David Mamet's early play gets a stripped-down staging at Space 55

Appropriately enough, theater doesn’t get any more “stripped down” than Space 55 Ensemble’s season opener of “Sexual Perversity in Chicago.”

The set consists of four plastic chairs and a pair of blackboards decorated (by troupe member Ashley Naftule) with Chicagobilia — a skyline and a Wrigley Field sign, along with lurid logos for ’70s strip clubs. When the show’s run comes to an end, they can erase the chalk and the 50-seat storefront theater will be back in pristine condition. No fuss, no muss.

David Mamet’s play, of course, is all fuss and muss, although most of the sexual perversity exists solely in the minds of the characters. First performed in 1974, the dark comedy focuses on a short-lived relationship — you wouldn’t call it a romance — between 20-somethings Dan Shapiro and Deborah Soloman, played here by Cole Schlesinger and Shannon Phelps.

Space 55 Ensemble: ‘Sexual Perversity in Chicago’

Yet the show is utterly dominated by Dan’s cartoonish pal, Bernard Litko. As played Ron Foligno in mutton-chop sideburns, Bernie is a one-man “Saturday Night Live” skit, a misogynist’s misogynist who tells stories of his sexual exploits that Penthouse Forum would reject as too over the top. When his creepy come-ons go unappreciated by the opposite sex, he’s quick to drop the C-bomb.

Schlesinger’s Dan, on the other hand, seems redeemable — shy and confused, but potentially kind, at least if he weren’t in the thrall of a wannabe sexist Svengali. When he first puts the moves on Deborah, their interaction is painfully, endearingly awkward. But neither is mature or self-aware enough to know what they expect from love, and so theirs is obviously doomed.

“Sexual Perversity” is the first Space 55 production under new artistic director Duane Daniels, an acting coach whom you may recognize as the high-school principal from TV’s “Veronica Mars.” His bare-bones, briskly paced approach serves this material well, putting the spotlight on the actors and on Mamet’s entertainingly stylized dialogue.

Mamet is often accused of being a misogynist himself, but it’s hard to imagine anyone leaving the theater with the idea that men are the superior sex. Yet it also is apparent that exploring the male psyche — even damaged, perpetually adolescent ones — is what fires him up. He does his best to make the women (including Deborah’s slightly embittered roommate Joan, played by Marcella Grassa) worthy sparring partners, but in the end he just doesn’t seem to find their reality and their concerns as intriguing.

Nonetheless, “Sexual Perversity” remains entertaining and, well, perversely compelling, and perhaps even more so four decades after it was written. Now a period piece, it captures the decadence of the ’70s, that fin-de-siècle world-weariness that seems to come back in vogue all too often, but always with a distinctive new flavor.